(Image: Rosatom)
The 11th and final consignment, of the used removable parts of the OK-550KM liquid metal-cooled reactor, was disassembled and sent for reprocessing last month. Rosatom says that technology developed at the Mayak Production Association enables "the complete recycling of dismantled cassettes with spent uranium-beryllium fuel from liquid metal coolant nuclear submarine reactors". Since 2014, one a year has been dismantled and sent to Mayak.
Vasily Tinin, director for state policy in the field of radioactive waste, used nuclear fuel and decommissioning of nuclear and radiation hazardous facilities at Rosatom, said: "Rosatom specialists have solved the most difficult problem of eliminating spent uranium-beryllium fuel, one of the most difficult to process types of spent nuclear fuel, enriched to over 90% and posing a serious threat to humans and the fragile environment of Northwest Russia. For the first time in the world, the technology for disassembling uranium-beryllium cores into their component parts, transporting and processing them has been demonstrated.
"The successful completion of the project to remove spent nuclear fuel from Gremikha means that today in the Russian part of the Barents Sea there will remain only one spent nuclear fuel storage facility, in Andreeva Bay, from where more than half of the spent nuclear fuel has already been removed, and the removal work is planned to be fully completed by the end of the current decade."
The Gremikha nuclear submarine base was established in 1958, and was the Soviet Union's only base designed for the operation and recharging of submarines' nuclear reactors with liquid metal coolant. The facility was transferred by the Russian Ministry of Defence to the Ministry of Atomic Energy in 2000, by when it did not meet modern safety standards. Since then, Rosatom has been working on a programme to clean up the waters of the Arctic and Russia's Far East. This has included the disposal of 202 nuclear submarines which have been decommissioned,
Rosatom says that in the Murmansk region the amount of used nuclear fuel has been halved, while all accumulated used nuclear fuel has now been removed from the Far East region.
